Depends on the time, CPAN was far better than setuptools. It was even better than dealing with RPM, early on.

RubyGems was the package manager that was really amazing and changed everything IMO. pip didn’t even exist until almost a decade later after that.

Python took the shell scripting platform from Perl just like PHP took the web scripting platform. It then extended to web servers (e.g., Django as an alternative to Ruby on Rails) and ML, but that was later.